Tip8: Go back to the future.
August 27th, 2010
People will find new ways to do old things with the wiki. Embrace them and encourage additional operational improvement.
Simple example of not trying to over-manage it
If you trust the people in your team, (honnestly if you can't, change job or get another team) you need to just need to trigger the use of the wiki. That will soon lead to a new group dynamic that will use the wiki for inventive purposes. The office kitchen replenishment list was just one of the nicer examples I have seen. A list of famuous quotes by team members is another fine example. As a guidance to new users, the team had put 'Put quotes here too memorable to forget yet too embarrassing to put on twitter. The team's privacy prevents me from pasting some of the more crazy examples I found on there.
If it looks and smells like a wiki, probably it is a wiki
Pieces of information, that changes often that merit to be remembered can go in the wiki. More tradional teams, will need to 'express' their information in text, but WordonWiki helps you with tables, pictures and alike. As an admin or team responsible, you may feel awkward to 'admit' that kind of stuff in your serious, purpose built wiki. Relax, that is ok. Play with the structure to reserve those entries under a 'special team' heading. It is perfectly ok to assemble a link to all these pages on this kind of team link.
Some samples of what we've seen used successfully:
- List of customer information for a support departement. The team used it to capture url's, special customer configurations and parameters. Every support team member used it to give remote support and to inform the team members about changes in the configuration.
- Checklists of all sorts: installation checklist, packaging guidelines, new customer activation process. Putting this kind of information in a wiki (editable by all involved) makes sure that people will quickly add a clarification note or correct an inconsistency.
- Special crash projects typically have a few dedicated pages. While it may seem an overkill when you are dealing with a crisis situation, you will thank the gods when the same crisis type occurs a few months later.
- Conference and beamer reservation pages. Simple, straighforward and it works.
- List of past system notices to inform users. Not only you can re-copy and paste from previous messages, you also get a nice log on when what event occured.
- Sample code snippets with some explanation when to use them.
- CV's of job applicants. Including the planning of who is seeing the candidate when. Also some preliminary feedback is noted by everyone.
I am sure some of you can add many more crazy, weird or funny examples. Comment on this post with your examples.